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here's my best effort: "With regard to the counterplea that a subject who could not be part of the proceedings took the stand as a defendant [?] , it is true that this counterplea served to establish the well-reasonedness of a constitutional complaint which was not yet entirely obvious.

Wow! Thank you mer, it's very good of you to smash that up and put it back together again properly.

Firstly, sorry - I should of course have typed vYstupovat and thanks for pointing that out.

You are right, it is a terrible sentence, and your final suggestion is excellent.

Both you and scrimshaw consider that that "neni" makes "zpusobila" negative, which I have to say really confuses me. Can it really work like that? I am sorry to ask but I would have been convinced that it could only negativise that final clause. Is it following a particular rule?

With your reformulations I came up with this (whilst sticking stubbornly to my reading of the "neni") -

"as to the counterplea that a subject that was unable to be a part of the proceedings figured as a defendant, it holds true now that it is not entirely obvious that this counterplea was able to establish the legitimacy of the constitutional complaint"

Which admittedly is still a tortuous sentence in English. I think I'll go for mer's far more elegant suggestion, but I wanted to at least have a model of the sentence that contained all the original Czech elements.

scrimshaw wrote:But, not being a lawyer, I have no idea what a constitutional complaint is...I'll take a guess and say the complaint questions whether something is constitutional.

No wonder you have no idea what it is, the term is meaningfull only in systems with separate constitutional court.

Constitutional complaint is an address to the Constitutional Court in which a person claims that his own constitutional rights were violated by some act by a public authority. It is admissible if and only if no other legal remedy is left. Constitutional Court can invalidate the act and possibly also the law which was base for it, it can order the public authority to restore the original state or to decide once again in a different way, but it can't order which way.

MARKPROPHET wrote:Both you and scrimshaw consider that that "neni" makes "zpusobila" negative, which I have to say really confuses me. Can it really work like that? I am sorry to ask but I would have been convinced that it could only negativise that final clause.

What final clause? The final clause with all unnecessary parts removed is:

(žádost) není způsobilá

that it is not entirely obvious that this counterplea was able to establish the legitimacy of the constitutional complaint

How is it possible that one “není” in the Czech original turned into one “is not” and one “was” in your translation? There is only one conjugated verb in “způsobilá založit důvodnost ústavní stížnosti není již zcela očividně”. So what is the counterpart of your “was” in the Czech original?

The verb “není” functions as a linking verb between the subject “žádost” and the adjective “způsobilá”. “Již zcela očividně” is only an unnecessary by comment in a form of adverbial of manner expanding the verb “není”.

it holds true now

The “již” has no temporal meaning. The phrase “již zcela” means something like “most (completely) of all” which together with “očividně” makes another ugly phrase in English. I think one intensifier (e.g. completely, entirely) is enough in English.

Wer, you wrote....The “již” has no temporal meaning. The phrase “již zcela” means something like “most (completely) of all” which together with “očividně” makes another ugly phrase in English. I think one intensifier (e.g. completely, entirely) is enough in English.

It doesn't really sound awkward.
We can put two adverbs together too, but we would have switched them.
It is obviously entirely incapable of .........

Thanks for that - I looked again and Zpusobila is of course an adjective, which explains why I was so completely confused by that sentence. At last I can see what it means. And thanks to scrimshaw for the good advice in English - you are right about there being no problem with two adverbs - "obviously entirely" is perfectly acceptable. Thanks to you both for looking at that!

scrimshaw wrote:Wer, you wrote....The “již” has no temporal meaning. The phrase “již zcela” means something like “most (completely) of all” which together with “očividně” makes another ugly phrase in English. I think one intensifier (e.g. completely, entirely) is enough in English.

Sounds similar to the English (at least American) phrase "most definitely."